


your world was not mine, your eyes told me so

by eynn



Series: had a dream, you and me in the war of the end times [5]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Nobody Dies, Time Travel Fix-It, and depa is ready to wreck a kaminoan, not things, sleep deprived obi-wan is forgetful and this scares cody, the clones slowly begin to realize that the jedi view them as people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:40:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24103009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eynn/pseuds/eynn
Summary: “What do we do now?” Rex says eventually, barely above a whisper.“Trust them,” Cody says reluctantly.Rex understands what isn’t said.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Depa Billaba & CC-10/994 | Grey
Series: had a dream, you and me in the war of the end times [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1713040
Comments: 66
Kudos: 1533





	your world was not mine, your eyes told me so

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to everyone who comments on this series! your ideas have kept my brain going

Rex lets his head fall back against the wall and groans. Cody nudges him in the hip with his foot; his ori’vod is mirroring him, back against the opposite wall of Rex’s tiny quarters. It’s literally just wide enough for his bunk.

“We put all our communicators in a shielded room and threw a couple of droid poppers in there,” Cody says. “That should have fried them enough for the Generals.”

“That’s a good idea,” Rex says wearily. “Way easier than dismantling them all by hand.” He lifts his arm just enough to send a text comm to the team in charge of getting rid of every comm on the ship except the internal ones, per General Skywalker and General Kenobi’s orders, and lets it fall back to the floor again.

“What do we do now?” he says eventually, barely above a whisper.

“Trust them,” Cody says reluctantly. Rex understands what isn’t said.

They trust their Jedi to lead them in battle, to give orders and hand out assignments. That’s never been questioned.

They don’t trust them with their safety or their comfort when they’re not in battle. Nobody cares about what a clone does when they’re not fighting. They’re made to fight and die for the Republic and anything else they spend time on is useless. Sometimes it can be seen as worse than useless; it takes their time and focus away from the war and that can be punished.

They’re not really people and so they don’t need to have wants or likes or hopes or dreams.

But now? Their Generals have changed and they want to get out of the war, and of course they’re all going to follow them. Even if it means technically committing treason, not to mention deserting en masse. They’ve been made to be loyal. But loyalty does not mean personal trust.

Rex is stuck between untrustworthy choices. He has a shiny Jedi child for a Commander, who outranks him and who has no experience with any kind of real combat at all, much less a full-scale war. His General had been barely older than him and now has been replaced by an older, broken version of himself.

It comes down to this: Generals Skywalker and Kenobi are their commanding officers. They have the authority to order their men to follow them in mutiny against the Republic.

The Republic has the authority to decommission them for following the orders of their commanding officers.

But the Republic is (relatively) far away and their Generals are right here and have a kind of desperate insanity flickering in their eyes.

If they want to survive this, they have to get away from anywhere the Republic can find them, fast, and then keep their Generals happy at all costs. It will literally mean their lives.

He shudders involuntarily. General Skywalker had practically thrown himself at him as soon as he came out of unconsciousness in the medbay, wrapping himself around him like a clinging vine and sobbing apologies for things he hadn’t done into his armor. In his own language. Spoken as naturally as a true brother. Where had he learned that? Who had trusted him, a General, enough to teach him?

And then there was the strange appearance of the General’s wife, the former Senator Amidala, and their two impossibly tiny shinies of their own. How could they even be out of their tube when they were so small?

He opens his eyes just far enough to look at Cody and sees he has his head tilted up to the ceiling.

“I guess we should just put this whole mess down to weird Force things?” he says, without much energy.

“Yeah,” Cody agrees, and yawns. He squints at Rex in the half-light. “At least our Generals have been decent so far. Not like some of the others you hear about.”

“They’re polite,” Rex admits. “Maybe a little crazy.”

“Definitely crazy,” Cody says, and glances around to make sure none of their comms are on and door is still closed. “But not – not kaminii crazy. They seem almost kind, sometimes.”

Rex nods and shivers again. “We need to sleep,” he says. “Before they have another set of orders for us.”

~

Cody gets a good two hours of sleep before he’s woken up by nightmares. He holds himself still and blinks into the darkness. It was nothing specific, just vague dreams of battles he’s seen with far worse outcomes added in, but it’s still unsettling and miserable to experience.

He’s about to resign himself to not being able to get back to sleep and get up and do something useful instead when his door slides open and then shuts again. Someone pads across the few feet of floor in his quarters and then abruptly flops into his bed.

“Rex,” he starts to say, and then freezes. The person is far too small and skinny to be any of his brothers.

General Kenobi tucks himself under Cody’s arm and buries his face in his neck. Cody is petrified in embarrassed shock and a growing amount of fear.

Who does the General think he’s snuggling up to? General Skywalker, maybe? He had raised him, from what Cody understands. Not to his Commander, for certain.

Kenobi blindly reaches out and pats him on the other arm. “They’re only dreams, my dear, we’re safe,” he mumbles, and then his breathing evens out into sleep.

Cody tries to edge away, but his General has managed to thoroughly tangle himself into him with only a few movements. One of his arms lies across his chest and the hand is tucked underneath him, one of his legs has snaked across and then under his own. He’s stolen half of Cody’s pillow with barely any effort and a good share of the blanket like an expert. He also managed to trap Cody’s own arm that he moved over his shoulders between the blanket drawn tightly around himself and his body.

Cody tries to breathe deeply and regrets it, because his General’s head is right there under his nose and he smells like longing and home. His hair is far longer than the version of him he knew, the one that would sooner die than crawl into his Commander’s bed in the middle of the night, and it’s a little rough and dry but it is the best thing Cody thinks he has ever felt.

He cautiously moves his free hand to adjust his General’s head a little and give him more space to breathe in, but the man just grumbles slightly and squashes his face right back into his neck.

It’s his duty to get himself out of this situation, to save face for his Jedi, but he can’t move without waking him up and that would be even more embarrassing. As his heartbeat finally begins to calm down, he resigns himself to a long, long night.

There’s no way he can sleep now. Hopefully the first person that shows up in the morning will be Rex. At least Rex already was tackle-hugged by his General earlier.

Cody falls asleep wondering who his General thought he was talking to.

~

Grey opens his eyes to a blurry mass of color and a slight headache. There’s pressure around his temples and on one of his arms, and he’s still lying down.

He blinks lazily and attempts to evaluate his situation. He feels slightly impaired, but reasonably functional. There is a little pain, but he assumes that dying probably hurts and it’ll go away soon enough.

With some effort, he sits up and tries to collect himself enough to stand. There must be a way he can go find Neyo and see if the shinies made it to safety. After all, he’d promised to watch over them after he had gone to march ahead.

He’s woken up in the infirmary of the Jedi Temple, with the soft lighting and the smell of bacta hanging in the air like syrup. He wrinkles his nose and cautiously puts weight on his legs. They hold him adequately and he starts walking towards the door of the small room they’d probably put his body in after the decommissioning. It would have been messy to conduct so many autopsies in the same room.

The pressure around his arm turns out to be a needle hooking him up to some kind of monitor. Grey carefully pulls it out and holds his finger over the little bleeding wound it causes more out of habit than conscious thought. He’s already dead, so he must just think he’s bleeding because that’s what people do when needles come out of them.

His heavy feet only get him as far as the door when it flies open and two healers and his General come running in. He courteously steps to the side, not really wanting to experience having someone run through him, and waits for them to pass.

They don’t pass.

General Billaba spins on her heel, turning to him, as the healers go shut off the machine that the needle was hooked up to. It’s beeping insistently.

“Commander! How are you feeling?”

He blinks at her in confusion. Why is the General here? Did she get decommissioned too? Why?

“They didn’t need to decommission you too, sir,” he says without thinking. “You aren’t the security breach.”

She reaches out and puts her hands on his shoulders, and they touch, they don’t pass through like he half expects even now. The warmth of her skin bleeds through the thin shirt he’s wearing. She tilts her head and looks up into his face and he can’t understand why she looks concerned.

“I think we might have some memory issues, Master Che,” she says.

He is guided over to the bed again and sits down on the edge of it while the healers poke at him. The needle is cleaned and the younger healer seems to be holding it ready to put back in his arm.

He doesn’t see the point. Why are they trying to medicate or monitor someone who is already gone?

“What is the last thing you remember, Commander?” the healer she had addressed as Master Che asks.

“Being decommissioned,” he answers.

The healers and General Billaba exchange looks. They seem confused.

“Can you describe exactly what happened?”

He mentally shrugs. It’s a bit strange to be reporting on the manner of his own death, but orders are orders, no matter where they come from or what they are. “I was instructed to report to the infirmary of the Jedi Temple along with my battalion upon the Council learning of the security threat we pose to the Order. Once there, we were taken in a few at a time for decommissioning. I was one of the first. I was allowed to lie down and then the injection was administered.”

There is silence.

“If you are satisfied with my report, General, I must tend to my new duties.”

“What are they?” she asks, and her voice sounds strangely hoarse.

“To watch over my brothers, now that I have gone ahead of them,” he answers, confused. He could have sworn he was taught that the Jedi had a similar view of death. “My body may be used for research to fix the security breach, and I will use my spirit to watch them and be there to welcome them when they fall in battle.”

His General’s hands are on his face, her thumb stroking his cheek. Her fingers brush lightly over a bandage on his temple and the shaved hair there that he hadn’t noticed before. There are tears slowly forming in her eyes.

“Commander – Grey – you’re not dead – we would never do that to you. Any of you,” she says before leaning forward and pulling him into a hug. He tenses, unsure of what to do.

The healers are whispering to each other and throwing him worried looks.

“I don’t understand,” he says weakly.

“Decommissioning,” she whispers, her breath warm on his ear. “Oh, Force, Grey. You thought we were going to kill you?”

“Yes?”

“Why?”

“You offered us to the healers to be investigated.”

“I — Please clarify, Grey. I don’t understand, but I am trying to.”

She still hasn’t let go of him and it’s very awkward but he summons all his composure to report. “General Skywalker’s holocall revealed that we are a serious security threat to the Jedi Order because of the slave chips implanted in our bodies that can affect our behavior. In order to remove this threat from the war strategy, the chips need to be taken out. You don’t know where they are or how to turn them off, so you would have to examine us to see how they affect the brain and body and possibly extract a few samples of chips and brain tissue for experimentation. Our battalion was chosen for this purpose.”

“It was a fairly simple examination,” Master Che says from somewhere in the room. “Just a scan to see where the chip is located and then a small incision to remove it.”

General Billaba’s fingers are petting his hair. There’s no other word for it. She’s sitting beside him now, one arm around his shoulders, keeping him firmly pressed to her side like a child.

“That’s not an examination, though. Sir.”

“What do you mean, Grey?” the General asks.

How many times does he have to repeat himself? “There’s too much risk and expense involved in a surgery. It’s more efficient and cost-worthy to decommission a batch to see where they grew wrong and fix the flaws in the next batch to be grown.”

Her arm tightens around him painfully at the same time as both healers visibly flinch, so they must be doing some Force-communication thing.

“You thought we were going to kill you all? Just get rid of you and start over with – with men without the chips?” she says.

“Isn’t that the best thing to do?”

There’s the sound of something shattering violently outside the room. The bed is shaking slightly.

“No,” she growls. “That’s absolutely abhorrent. Who would even think of doing something like that? For something you have no control over? Something you didn’t even consent to? For a fucking slave chip?”

Grey tries to turn his head to see her face. His General is very, very angry and he doesn’t quite understand why. “We’re clones, sir. We’re made to die.”

“Fuck that,” she hisses. “How many of you have the Kaminoans killed?”

“Sir?”

“Decommissioned!”

“Oh.” He pauses to think. “Only a few complete batches that I knew of, and some defective ones. There’s at least one in every batch, sir. Something goes wrong in the growth tube and they’re not up to standard. A few pass the tests but they’ll never be promoted or anything. Well, not usually. CT-7567 made it to Captain somehow, but that’s probably just because his defect is only cosmetic.”

“I would like a number, Commander. Guess if you must.”

“About three or four thousand that I know of, sir. Probably more in other parts of the city I wasn’t assigned to.”

She turns and presses her forehead to the top of his head. Her breathing is strangely erratic and something else is cracking and whining outside the room.

“Depa. Depa, calm down before you –”

There’s a crash and Master Che winces. “There goes the other window. Depa, please calm down.”

“They’re killing them!”

“There’s nothing we can do about it right now.”

“But there fucking well is something we can do about it!” She jerks her head up and glares at the healer.

Grey ducks his head and tries to make himself smaller.

Everyone instantly turns to look at him, which is the exact opposite reaction he wanted.

“I’m sorry,” his General says. “Here, can you walk? We’ve only done three rounds of chip removal surgeries so far and – oh, Force, do all of you think we’re going to—?”

Grey nods uncertainly. “We were instructed to report for decommissioning, as we understood the order,” he offers.

She slips her arm around him again, helping him stand up with his own arm over her shoulders. He protests that he is just fine and mostly functional, but she only looks at him with wide, horrified eyes and tells him firmly that he has just had brain surgery and she is not letting him walk unassisted.

It’s the healers’ nods that make him stop insisting that there’s no need for his General to trouble herself for him.

She walks him out of the room, past other rooms where he can see the still (but not dead, apparently, just medicated?) bodies of his men.

“Why did you not try to run away?” she asks quietly as they walk slowly through the infirmary.

Grey blinks. “It was an order.”

“But you thought we were ordering you to just walk to your deaths!”

“Yes.”

“Grey, that’s not – When you get an order like that, you don’t have to obey it. You don’t have to obey every single order you’re given, especially if it’s one that places you in senseless danger or in the power of someone you know is going to abuse you.”

“But we were ordered,” he repeats. “You were watching us. If we tried to leave too you would know something was going on and stop us.”

“Leave too?”

He freezes.

“Grey, I won’t be angry. I won’t punish you, I promise. Or anyone else.”

“I sent the shinies away with the others,” he whispers. “They’re too young to be decommissioned. And the others went to try to find General Skywalker.”

“The others?”

He nods.

“What do you mean?”

“The rest of the vod on Coruscant.”

She blinks. “Okay. Okay. Let’s just get you out here and let your men see that we’re not going to ki—decommission you all, okay?”

He can tell from the moment he steps out into the hallway outside the infirmary that his men are both terrified and grieving, but they snap to attention as soon as they see their General.

Then they see him.

“Grey?” comes the first disbelieving whisper and then his brothers are around him, holding him, touching and sobbing and running gentle fingers over the bandage on his head.

“They didn’t mean decommissioning,” he says as the darkness begins to rise up again. He’s so tired now that the shock is fading. “We get surgery. To take the chips out. Like real people. They don’t think it’s right to kill us for being defective.”

Once again, his General is the last thing he sees, but this time she’s startling up from the wall she’s been leaning against, one hand outstretched, and he feels her catch him as he begins to fall.


End file.
